Heaney's "Bog" Poems

It may help you to understand Heaney's "Punishment" to know that many of his early poems are inspired by bodies that were discovered in the bogs of Europe. Ireland is a country that is full of bogs (peat, an important fuel source, is harvested from boglands), and Heaney draws comparisons between the bogs and bog-bodies of central and northern Europe and the history of his own Northern Ireland, particularly the period known as The Troubles. Something about the bogs causes people and animals to be incredibly well-preserved in them. We don't know for certain how these people ended up in bogs, but it appears as though they were sacrificial killings. One of the bodies, of the so-called Tollund Man of Denmark's Jutland Peninsula, has a noose around his neck ("The Tollund Man" is one of Heaney's well-known bog poems: "Some day I will go to Aarhus / To see his peat-brown head,/The mild pods of his eye-lids, / His pointed skin cap..."). You can see a good picture of the Tollund Man (he is the first image), as well as other bog-preserved bodies, at http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2007/09/bog-bodies/clark-photography.

In particular, have a good look at the last photograph, of the "Windeby girl" (who it turns out is a boy, but that is of little consequence). This is the body that inspired "Punishment." It's one of Heaney's most controversial poems. In the 1970s, several Catholic women in Northern Ireland were abused--their heads shaven, their faces tarred--for fraternizing with British soldiers. Heaney yokes this history with the body pulled from the German bog. This is controversial enough, but the real controversy comes from the way Heaney sexualizes the experience, and from the way he seems to understand the atrocities on an intimate level. We can talk more about these things in class, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on this or any of the other poems by Heaney.

It's tragic, really, that we are only discussing one poem by Eavan Boland. She is one of my favorite poets (That's not why it is tragic, of course). If you would like to write about "The Pomegranate," I'd be pleased to read what you have to say. And if you want to study Heaney or Boland (or Yeats, or Joyce, or any of the other Irish writers we've seen glimpses of this semester) in greater depth, there's always my Modern Irish course, 486R. :)

Mrs. Dalloway...Irrevocable

There was one sentence in the very first chapter that really made me think when I read it and then reflected on it later. The part is where Mrs. Dalloway is just getting started with her day. She is just thinking about Big Ben when her next thoughts are these, "There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable."

I really liked the very last part of the quote, "...then the hour, irrevocable...". To me, there was something very poetic about this part. I read "then the hour"- kind of fast, but the then came the comma and then "irrevocable" which I just read very slow, and melancholy even. But this line also made me reflect on time itself. After I had read and thought about it, it made me ask myself some questions. Some of the questions were "Why did the hour fly by so fast?" and also "Did I do anything in the last hour that was worth anything?" "Did I contribute anything to myself or others?" "Was the last hour productive?" "Was the last hour valuable?". Then there were other questions about the future like, "What can I do to make the next hour better or more productive?" "Or am I just going to waste the next hour wondering what could have been or what could be?"

I think that the last question especially reflects on the book. I mean the whole book is about people thinking about what happened in the past, and what is to come in the future. Time is definitely a huge theme in this novel.

Mrs. Dalloway

I hope you are enjoying Mrs. Dalloway. Over the next few days I'm going to be beginning some threads on a few of the works we have been reading. I have been meaning to do this but a combination of illness and midterm grading has resulted in a slight delay. Ryan was good enough to start a thread on Wilfred Owen, and Emily posted a very thoughtful response to Joyce, so I won't need to start new threads there (though I would like to encourage a dialogue, especially on "The Dead," which we were unable to discuss in class), but I will be posing some questions about Conrad, Eliot, Yeats, and Woolf.

1. One thing you have no doubt noticed about Mrs. Dalloway is that there is no real plot, or at least the plot is very thin. This can be a bit surprising, even offputting, for readers who are used to a traditional plot line. Every work of fiction needs some kind of engine, something that makes the reader want to turn the next page. If it lacks this engine, a story or novel will not succeed because the reader will put it down. So here is my question: What is the engine in Mrs. Dalloway? What makes you want to keep reading? (Or, if you hate the novel, you can write about why you don't want to keep reading). If this is not a plot-driven novel, what kind of novel is it?

2. Mrs. Dalloway seems to be very random at times, jumping in and out of characters' minds. Can you discern any rhyme or reason to this? Are these characters connected in any way? I realize you have probably not finished the novel since you only needed to read part of it for today, but try to draw some connections between the characters and/or their stories if you feel these connections exist.

3. Do you see any similarities between Mrs. Dalloway and The Dead?

4. In one sense, we can think of Clarissa and Mrs. Dalloway as two separate characters in the novel (see the bottom of 2560: "She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible, unseen; unknown [. . .] this being Mrs. Dalloway; not even Clarissa any more; this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway). If we accept this premise as true, what are the characteristics of each woman?

5. How is the theme of memory/reflection/nostalgia important to the story? And is it just a theme, or is more than this?

There is more I want to ask, but I can't really ask it without giving away the rest of the novel. I will post a Part II on Thursday.

It is fitting and sweet...

Maybe I am misinterpreting the saying, but when I hear "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori," I don't actually take that literally. I don't think that they actually meant that you would be happy to die, that you would actually feel joy while you were dying. Maybe I am wrong, but I don't think that's what is meant by the saying that Wilfred Owen is reacting to.

When I hear the saying, I imagine myself in a scenario. I think, if someone were to threaten harm to my family, would I be willing to stand up against them, even if it meant that I could be hurt? If someone were to threaten the liberties and freedoms of my country, would I be willing to fight, even if it meant I could die? I have never been forced into either of those scenarios, but I would like to think that I would, in fact, be willing to fight and die to protect those whom I love.

In his poem, Wilfred Owen called this saying a lie. Yet, ironically, he did die for his country. Thoughout his poem, he describes the terror, the deprivation, and the pain that these soldiers went through. I don't doubt that conditions were horrible, that they suffered greatly. However, that brings up a question I think is important: despite the horror and pain (physical, emotional, mental) that he experienced in the war, he still returned to fight. Why would he do this? If he honestly thought that there was no value to be found in fighting for one's country, why did he return to the battlefield, particularly after his breakdown? Faced with the terror of almost certain-death, why didn't he desert or defect? He must have found some reason for fighting, something more important than the terror of dying, something that would have transcended that fear, to bring him back to the battlefield.

I don't want to die, but at the same time, I believe that there are certain things that are worth dying to protect. I would like to think that, despite his words, Wilfred Owen felt the same.

Heart of Darkness as Undercover Cop Narrative

As I've been reading Heart of Darkness, I've been struck how big of an influence it is on the pop culture I surround myself with. While I've managed, for the most part, to limit my fanaticism for superhero comics from coming into these blog postings/comments, anyone who has read (or seen since last weekend) Alan Moore's Watchmen can see all sorts of parallels in it (Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comic series also features Kurtz himself...hooray for the public domain!). But the other thing I always think of is any undercover cop movie (Eastern Promises, Donnie Brasco, Training Day, Reservoir Dogs). You know the cliche...good cop goes undercover to work for a bad man, but ends up realizing that the bad man maybe isn't all that bad, maybe it's the societal constructs that have created him, etc.

Also, Apocalypse Now is more or less a straight adaptation (if not a transposition) of HOD (and is also a huge influence on Watchmen...full circle!).

In any case, I think it's fascinating how a single type of narrative can permeate the entire Western artistic consciousness and leave its stamp on just about every popular/relevant medium. Quite an achievement for a hundred-page novella about ivory traders.

The Lady: A Contradiction

Do you remember a time in your life when you were so "rest-less" with your situation that you couldn't decide if you were coming or going? I think this is what the Lady of Shalott must have been experiencing in this poem. As I read and reread her story, I couldn't help but notice what a contradiction she is. In line 64, "But in her web she still delights / To weave the mirror's magic sights." She doesn't seem to be at all dissatisfied with her situation, but she delights in her work and all that she is able to see in the mirror. Just a few lines later the words tell a very different story. In line 71, " 'I am half sick of shadows,' said / The Lady of Shalott." You can feel her dismay which follows so quickly after her delight. Is this not the essence of restlessness, the turmoil we often feel inside to be out and doing?
On a side note, I keep going back to the recording of this poem that we heard in class. It has so much life in it when accompanied by the music. Perhaps Tennyson envisioned it being told in such a way. Though he didn't have the music, he certainly had the words. :)

Is it just me or does anyone else see the resemblance??